No Exit, Deliverance

James Loney

What is captivity but a kind of living hell?  To live comfortably inside one's skin without imposed limits on spatial mobility forms the basis of individual autonomy, what we generally regard as freedom and liberty.  By contrast, the horror of entrapment coupled with physical and sexual abuse or torture forms a chilling dungeon to the larger cells of imprisonment and detention. 

To be held hostage — even intellectually to an idea — connotes a kind of injustice, being held against one’s will.   Yet self-willed captivity — seclusion, cloistering, solitude, isolation — exists as an option for religious, creative artists, hermits, misanthropes and contrarians of all stripes.  Writer and artist colonies proliferate in the belief and practice of creating conditions against habitual routine, inducing focus via isolation. 

No such illusions guide prisons, detention centres or any number of wretched locales where hostages are trapped and hidden.

Ingrid Betancourt held captive by FARC

To compare the terrifying circumstances of hostages —abductees whose lives are forcibly held — to the self-imposed isolation undertaken by creators or cloistered religious orders would be outrageous.   Yet sustained confinement— regardless of cultural/social/political context— has unmistakable, common effects.  Without the distractions of day-to-day routine, minds enclosed by physical constraints necessarily turn inward.  The dangers of enforced introspection — being trapped in one’s own consciousness from sensory or social deprivation — are frightening to contemplate.  That way madness surely lies.

In recent hostage narratives — three about several years of captivity in Colombia, one about being held in Iraq — the writers have to endure not only the constant threat represented by their captors, but also the uneasy company of fellow hostages.

My trek through these post-modern seasons in hell began with Ingrid Betancourt’s Even Silence Has an End and concluded with James Loney’s Captivity.  In between were parallel Columbian accounts: Clara Rojas’ Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle and Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell.  (As a sidebar I watched Hunger, British artist Steve McQueen’s provocative immersion into Bobby Sands and the IRA’s “dirty protest” of the ‘70’s in Belfast’s infamous Maze prison.)

What’s fascinating about the experiences of the hostages in Colombia are the jungle-specific privations, as much as the particular insights and self-reflection offered by the different narrators.  As a genre, prison memoirs derive value from the quality, range and depth of concerns their writers tackle.  The sheer duration of the Colombian hostages’ experiences taxes comprehension.  Not weeks or even months but years were logged in the Colombian jungle.  (Some hostages, contemporary with Betancourt and the others, remain under FARC control.) By contrast, James Loney’s account of four spartan months holed up in suburban Baghdad seems mercifully brief.    Externally, the two sets of circumstance could not be further apart.  Yet all the hostage accounts touch on issues of faith and the “hell of other people” that is enforced captivity with strangers.

Ingrid Betancourt's incredible ordeal — six and a half years as hostage of the FARC revolutionary paramilitary in Colombia — is related in often excruciating detail in her gripping account, Even Silence Has an End.  Opening the book, she plunges the reader immediately into the gritty struggle of day-to-day existence: an early escape attempt with Clara (Rojas), assistant on Betancourt's presidential campaign, captured at the same time in February 2002 opens the book.  The two women's shifting, wary regard of each other informs each of their books.   Given the extreme circumstances that tested their particular friendship, it’s not surprising each woman would seek to justify her conduct under duress, after the fact.

Intensely personal and necessarily introspective, Even Silence has an End finds Betancourt burrowing into experiences she would have shrunk from imagining in her previous existence as a member of Colombia's educated elite.  The degradations of near constant moves in the hostile jungle — swarming with voracious insects in all-too-real horror-movie 3-D — are chronicled from a distinctly female perspective.  Betancourt's subjective record of her captivity — the shifting society of fellow captives, FARC guards, commanders, and rangueras (guerrilla girlfriends) — provides compelling episodes easily imagined in cinematic images.

FARC rangueras

There are daring escape attempts: two (at least) with Clara as unwilling or obtuse participant that land both in a cage from which the book begins.  Much later comes an extended attempt with Lucho, a fellow politician whose friendship became a lifeline.   Their capture — after surviving hours adrift in treacherous Amazonian waters, against hunger and the danger of Lucho's lapse into diabetic shock — is heart-rending if somewhat inevitable.  Not so Pinchao, a policeman whom Bagaietancourt befriends and urges to escape, successfully.  These episodes are recounted with Mission Impossible-style details remarkable for their vivid recall.

FARC hideout

Besides the grinding despair that captivity induces, Betancourt's chief bête noire, like Loney’s, is boredom.  To relieve the endless stretches of wasted time — as days become months become years — she devises strategies to cope with the hostility of fellow captives as much as the depredations or reprisals from guards.    She finds surprising allies in some FARC guerrillas — her appraisal of the women in particular is noteworthy for the unspoken solidarity gender alone can allow— and is conversely disillusioned or disappointed in others in whom she invested more.  Betancourt's treatment of Clara's pregnancy, the birth of her child and its care by the FARC provide opaque glimpses of circumstances fraught with uncomfortable questions.  Amongst the most moving passages in the book are Betancourt's regular invocations of family: her father, whose death she uncovers inadvertently early on in captivity; her mother whose faithful radio messages and tireless diplomatic efforts provide an emotional backbone; and her own children, Melanie and Lorenzo, whose teenage milestones she is cruelly aware of missing.  Given Betancourt's heightened awareness of her own pivotal role as mother and daughter, her discomfort with Clara's desperation to have a child and her subsequent pregnancy under duress, reads as unsympathetic, yet credible.  The strains of being the only women prisoners — to say nothing of their unwilling co-habitation in the early years — etch the divides of habit, class, and personality between Betancourt and Rojas that would otherwise be overlooked in civil society.  Under the constraints and caprices of enforced captivity, their quotidian interactions degenerate into petty squabbles.  The tendency to assert dominance and control in the absence of any real self-determination becomes the source of the hostages' bitter descent into feuds and friction. 

Ecuadorean soldiers uncover abankdoned FARC camp (Rodrigo Buendia, AFP, Getty Images)

Betancourt, assuming leadership tactics time and again, becomes a target of resentment and hostility amongst the other captives.  Her refusal to capitulate to the FARC's agenda of defeat fuels her quest to improve her own condition as much as those of the other prisoners.   Aware her identity and sense of self are giving way under captivity's boot, Betancourt adopts whatever tools she can muster against derangement.  Books — a dictionary and Bible as well as Harry Potter — become touchstones and beacons to the world outside.  The radio — with its regular broadcast to the hostages of messages from families — becomes a cherished, if contentious, lifeline.  Even her status as a dual citizen of France and Colombia, itself a source of derision and division within the camps, eventually works to her advantage as she uses her fluency to teach guerilleras and prisoners alike.

What ultimately sustains Betancourt throughout her extended ordeal in the jungle is faith.  She writes of her relationship to God and the Virgin Mary as a given: faith as consolation, as constant even in anger, hard-won and tested by seemingly endless physical hardships yet never abandoned.  Betancourt's journey of faith — her practice of prayer, her insistence on the Bible as a source of spiritual as much as cultural survival — and her own privations and sufferings do not, despite their moving account, endow her conduct with irreproachable virtue.  The complexities of the story she relates — the enforced society of strangers united only by captivity, the manipulations of the guerrilla leaders in managing the hostages' profiles to the world at large, the daunting logistics of survival within and escape from the camps and relentless jungle marches — mitigate against easy binary appraisals. [Fellow captives Clara Rojas and the trio of American hostages with whom she shared prison time in the jungle —one of whom she became close to — have each published disparate, often pointedly critical accounts.  Rojas' Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle preceded Betancourt's publication by more than six months.  Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Goncalves, Keith Stansell and Tom Howes (with Gary Brozek) was published about a year ahead of Even Silence has an End.]

What emerges over the course of hundreds of page-turning action and reflection is the scope of wretchedness that was Betancourt's season in hell.  That it was relieved by snatches of friendship, glimmers of decency against all odds and calculation, displays of humanity as humbling as the all-pervasive filth and deprivation are testament to Betancourt's ability to sound the beat of this particular heart of darkness.  Not surprisingly her life post-captivity — the book ends with the triumphant release of a select group of hostages in a dramatic rescue operation — has been fraught with controversy.  Lionized on the Oprah show following the book's launch, Betancourt latest struggle has been a suit from her former husband claiming proceeds from the book's sales.

By contrast, Clara Rojas’ Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle—was written less than a year after freedom.  At a third the length of Betancourt's memoir and Out of Captivity by the trio of American hostages, Rojas' account often reads as opaque, less a thoughtful record of experience than a justification — to herself as much as her son — of lost years of wretched captivity.  

In many moments of Captive, she addresses Emmanuel directly seeking to explain and justify the brutality she experienced.  However, one key part of the puzzle is purposely left out.  Comfortable enough recounting the woefully inadequate FARC responses to the practical demands of pregnancy and birth on the move in the jungle, Rojas sidesteps curiosity about the baby's father with a vow of privacy, undertaken for her son's protection.   It's understandable she would resist disclosure as a violation of privacy, needing to exercise this most fundamental right to protect herself and Emmanuel.  The bitter truth of captivity shared by the three linked hostage narratives from Columbia — Even Silence Has an End, Captive, and Out of Captivity — is the destruction of any sense of personal destiny.  Trapped in mind-numbing routines of haphazard marches and encampment dictated by the FARC, the hostages wage an uphill battle to maintain a sense of self against grinding, relentless odds.  Tormented by doubts surrounding her decision to accompany Betancourt, Rojas’ refusal to disclose the identity of Emmanuel's father on the grounds of personal privacy is hardly surprising.  Unfortunately, the resort to secrecy leaves a gaping hole in her narrative.  While it’s still absorbing to discover the details of the FARC’s fumbling attempts to cope with an unscripted event like pregnancy and childbirth, Rojas provides little insight into her state of mind then and after, regardless of naming names.  How much more moving and inspiring her story might have been if she had been able to find a way other than omission to probe her own feelings of motherhood in extremis.

Where Betancourt’s and Rojas’ are distinctly female voices, Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle offers the overlapping accounts of three male hostages: Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell, Americans hired by a privately contracted company as part of the official US war on drugs.  A year after Betancourt and Rojas are captured, Gonsalves, Stansell and Howes literally crash into FARC-occupied jungle on February 23, 2003.  On a regular surveillance mission to monitor drug-related operations in the Colombian jungle, their plane’s engine fails and they are forced to crash land.  Emerging from the wreckage, they and two other survivors are quickly surrounded by FARC guerrillas whose leader, Sonia, separates them into two groups.  Wounded, wearing street clothes only, the authors embark on what turns out to be a grueling 22-day trek through mountainous jungle made extra challenging by Colombia’s high altitude.   The punishing marches undertaken by the FARC — necessary to avoid detection by the Colombian army — are encountered in all three books.   Pain, exhaustion, mud, and the relentless pace set by the guerillas over endless days (and often nights) of marching are constants.  What’s reported in the Americans’ account — missing from the two native Columbians’ — is the factor of altitude.  This explains the cold nights related in passing by Betancourt in a supposedly tropical country around the equator.

Out of Captivity benefits from its three narrators each taking turns providing individual eyewitness-type accounts.  They corroborate each others’ testimony, often arriving at shadings of meaning by an accrual of details.   Their responses to Betancourt and the contingent of political hostages around her are revealing.  Stansell dismisses Betancourt as high-handed, essentially a snob, and untrustworthy.   His overall appraisal, though not entirely unsympathetic at specific incidents, remains remarkably consistent.  Gonsalves’ relationship to Betancourt undergoes a more dramatic arc: from wary indifference to intense friendship and guarded intimacy, even jealousy.  In Betancourt’s account, desire is endorsed in the FARC’s jungle operations, with couplings and rivalries amongst the captors regularly noted.  Its more renegade counterpart, love, however, is pretty near impossible.  The would-be lovers’ efforts are doomed by the circumstances of captivity, large and small.  Ingenious contrivances adopted against their captors’ vigilance unravel under prolonged separation, as suspicion and resentment replace romantic longing.

If Even Silence Has an End succeeds as a kind of gritty, real-life romantic thriller—Captive and Out of Captivity serve largely as apologias, largely aimed at “setting the record straight.” James Loney’s angle on Captivity is an extended argument for pacifism against his experience as a hostage in Iraq.   Faith is what propels Loney to Iraq in 2005.  An activist Catholic raised in Sault Ste. Marie, later based in Toronto, Loney joins Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization dedicated to non-violent witness as peaceful intervention in violent conflicts.  Taking their cue from the Apostles, CPT members consciously choose to mingle with groups and individuals working for peace against the overwhelming presence of armed conflict.  In November 2005, the CPT Iraqi group comprising Loney, Harmeet Sooden, Tom Fox, and Norman Kember are abducted en route to a meeting with an Islamic group, the Muslim Scholars.   They are held in two houses for 118 days.  During that time, the carrot of freedom is repeatedly dangled before them; its opposite outcome is visited upon Tom Fox, whose military background — despite having served strictly as a musician without combat experience — likely contributes to his murder. 

Whereas Betancourt suffered distinct periods of being chained in solitary punishment for her escape attempts, Loney and the others are regularly chained together as a condition of confinement.  As with the Colombian hostages, survival issues of food and hygiene become paramount, with personal humiliation recounted as testament to the debasing conditions of captivity.    Living intensely with a succession of individuals they nickname “Junior,” “Uncle,” “Medicine Man,” each of the four hostages adopts strategies to cope with the endless boredom.  Marveling at Sooden’s general composure, irritated by Fox’s insistence on “being in the now”—an odd echo of the American hostages’ mantra of choosing the “hard right thing”  in the face of the FARC’s revolutionary caprices—Loney exposes his own turmoil and impatience with his fellow hostages as much as his captors.    More so than their US counterparts in Colombia, the Iraqi hostages are united by a common mission as peacemakers; that unity, however, is challenged at one point as the avowedly Christian aspect of Christian Peacemaker Teams is called into question by Sooden, a Sikh.  

Harmeet Sooden, CPT member

Unlike Betancourt, Loney does not attempt escape.  Not that he doesn’t consider or fantasize about it.  In both instances, however, the tight circumstances of the group—their weakened physical condition to say nothing of their lack of Arabic in immediately hostile surroundings—check impulses toward freedom.  As troubling as Loney finds this acceptance of their fate, he becomes aware of his captors’ parallel experience.  As they wait for Medicine Man to once again deliver the latest news of Godot-like negotiations for their release, the hostages observe their captors’ liberty as constrained by much the same factors as theirs.  That jailers necessarily partake of imprisonment is not revelatory.  As a peace activist, however, Loney fingers the cult of violence and conflict that leads to situations that enslave captor and captive alike.  Later, following liberation by a British-led international rescue team, Loney is cautioned against Stockholm syndrome coloring his concern for the fate of his captors. 

In his introduction and post-liberation, Loney ponders the paradox of his release effected not through negotiation but by force, the very action he had gone to Iraq to oppose.  He notes how every army or violent force throughout history has operated under the conviction that they were right, that they were “the good guys.”  He observes how this same principle animates the “bad guys” who abducted the CPT team, even as they cheer and identify with the “good guys” in the Hollywood action movies they watch to kill time.   For them as for the soldiers who liberate the hostages, there is no irony.   For Loney, every side in the struggle sees themselves as the good guys, even in situations of occupation like Iraq.

For all these hostages, the hell of slow erasure—acclimation to everyday privations, piecemeal bargains with self and others over petty advantages, accommodation to filth and constant fear, chronic lack of privacy—is over.  What’s invaluable in the best of these narratives is the quality of witness: the courage to relive wretchedness all over again, not for cringe-inducing reality-TV notoriety, but as a necessary journey toward true catharsis.  In our media-saturated, irony-laden culture of overdrive, It’s rare to find—never mind seek out—gritty, old-fashioned forms of release based not on (self) indulgence but its opposite.  Without so much as a whiff of the other much more taboo “s” word, Silence and Captivity resonate as chronicles of enforced self-reflection, the void of captivity—its grinding sense of time irretrievably lost—offered up as hapless sacrifice at the altar of freedom inseparable from existence.

I confess [the app]

Ah the confessional app,  push-button answer to feel-bad guilt, the download generation's escape valve for nagging conscience on a data plan.  
Bless me facebook for I have sinned... it has been a million seconds since my last status update ... I accuse myself of following these tweets ...

Hunger | Artist

Everything about British artist Steve McQueen's extraordinary film Hunger holds surprises.  For one there's the filmmaker himself and his famous doppelganger; it's hard not to banish the popular movie icon of The Getaway or any number of other action flicks.  And after watching Hunger, it's tempting to assume or at least wonder if its author might be Irish.

But Hunger is no easy work of art. (And whatever his name's origins, McQueen's visage immediately places him within the Grenadian and Trinidadian continuum that is his heritage.)
Whatever drove McQueen to focus on IRA prison protestor Bobby Sands and his infamous hunger strike at the Maze prison in 1981 remains mysterious. 
 Yet the film — as much as the history that inspired it — is compelling, and horrific; distasteful to watch — depictions of the "dirty" protest prison cells smeared with excrement start early in the film — yet riveting and unforgettable.  The uncompromising, deliberate attention to details reveals its strategy in one brief scene where prison guards in riot gear are brought in by the regular guards who spit on a mirror and polish it.  McQueen seems to be doing much the same throughout the film: despoiling a looking glass and holding it up for both self-reflection and see-through perception.  He invites the audience to look at the often gut-wrenching images he stages, at the actors in them, and at the responses the actors and images give rise to.  The images of the prisoners — extremely thin, often naked, beaten — contrasts with the neatness of the prison guards. 

McQueen's guards are not strutting sadists;  they are grimly methodical.  McQueen's empathy for the guards — his complicity with them — is revealed during a particularly harrowing sequence of beatings when one of the guards in riot gear is shown out of his helmet, tears streaming down his face.  (In a 2009 interview in W magazine, McQueen revealed that he found himself in tears during this scene, experiencing the very real impact of the brutality enacted for the sake of verisimilitude.)  In a rare sequence outside the prison, the guard who opens the film visits his mother in a nursing home.  As he tries in vain to make contact with the person imprisoned within her immobile physical form, a man with a gun enters and without ceremony shoots and kills him.  Nothing wakes the mother, nor does anyone interfere with the murderer.  In another sequence, a guard wearing a dust mask dumps liquid on a floor oozing urine dumped out of their cells by the prisoners. As the guard systematically pushes the liquid along the hallway floor — sometimes choosing to shove it back under a cell door or two — the brutal conditions of the prison and its impact on guards and prisoners both are inescapable.

As for Bobby Sands, he is played by Michael Fassbender in a performance that makes Mickey Rourke's comeback in The Wrestler appear breezy by comparison.  Fassbender's gaunt skeletal physique recalls images of Holocaust survivors.  In a bath after starting the hunger strike that ends his life, he summons up David's famous depiction of Jean-Paul Marat.  As A.O. Scott has noted in his New York Times review, Hunger calls up images from Renaissance artists.  Yet it comes by its artistic and filmic references honestly.  (Unlike the New Yorker's David Denby, I found neither creepiness nor preening aestheticization in Hunger's relentless gaze.) The squalor of the "dirty" protest — its dehumanizing effects — are depicted vividly enough to incite real outrage and discomfort.

The film's centrepiece is a remarkable 17-minute scene between Sands and Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), a priest and sympathizer.  Here the film's contribution by co-writer playwright Enda Walsh comes into focus.  The taut dialogue is a kind of debate between adversarial friends.   That the camera does not move, that there are neither cuts to close-ups or cutaways of any kind, underscores the chilling scrutiny applied to the men's arguments.  It is McQueen's most naked moment and a singular demonstration of the film's technique;  watch this, he urges us, and listen too.  Up to this point, the film's text has been minimal and largely in obvious service to the workaday realities of the hellish Maze depicted.  In 20 minutes — including the close-up monologue by Sands and short coda from Moran — the film bursts full of rapid-fire exchanges, a veritable feast of unfettered talk in a film famished of local speech so far.  This entire sequence would be remarkable even if what the characters said to each other were less than compelling or sounded less true.  In its austere technique — combined with the dialogue's feisty honesty inhabited by actors too true to their roles to be less than authentic —  this scene reveals what Hunger is all about.  Protest is an action, it has a face, it can be extreme, the film insists.  Moderation also has a face; it can be haggard, immutable. (In a striking scene, a prison worker wearing what appears to be a decontamination- type suit takes a power washer to the endless concentric circles of excrement created on a prison wall.  The jet of liquid slowly reveals white beneath curds of brown its force pushes aside and liquefies.)  In the end, art is also extreme; it can adopt an extreme choice, pushing the bounds of acceptability to remove comfortable ideas and attitudes about squalor, about beauty, about heroism, about inhumanity.  Thankfully, McQueen stops short of calling up the divine.

As Time Goes By: Terence Davies' Own Private Liverpool

Terence Davies' idiosyncratic ode to his hometown of Liverpool, has the kind of barbed relation to mass box office appeal that its titular soundalike Sex and the City has to art cinema.  Released in 2009, Of Time and the City employs Davies' trademark meditative touchstones in a manner closer to the work of Steve Reich than say Madonna.

So how does a working class misfit like Davies develop a peculiarly inward iconography against, say, the more polemical approach of contemporaries like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach?  Two words: sex and movies.  Fondly recalling his teenage seduction by the silver screen, Davies pays homage to glories past in an opening montage set within a long-gone movie palace proscenium, archival footage giving way to brightly sunlit shots of neoclassical architecture (Kenneth Clark Civilization-style).  Davies proceeds to serve up a lyrical interior travelogue of Liverpool the dowdy, a parochial hotbed, its sonorous tour guide snidely dismissive of mass culture.  Landmark events such as Queen Elizabeth's coronation are scoffed at as "the Betty Windsor show", the city's favourite sons the Beatles and their rise to fame brushed aside with undisguised disdain or grudging acknowledgment, at best.

It's tempting to regard Davies' rueful jibes — of slags and the city —  as a defiant gesture at his producers' perverse hire of a downbeat auteur for a commercial take on civic shine.  But Davies is no slumming esthete or class-conscious contrarian.  Where his better known contemporaries Ken Loach and Mike Leigh attack working class experience with overtly political agendas, Davies adopts an approach closer to chamber music: setting the fleeting yet telling images of working class existence to period notes that paradoxically transcend time.

It's not surprising to learn — given his talent for transcendence — of Davies' Catholic background.  Offering up cherished relics of a Catholic, working class childhood, Davies rejects doctrinaire reverence for a healthy embrace of his new-found homosexuality. This crisis of faith leads Davies to embrace a new altar in the movies' large-than-life stars and escapist fantasies.  Rather than casting Liverpool as a town on the verge of becoming hip post-Beatles' explosion, Davies celebrates Liverpool's down market character, without romanticizing its hardships.  Small shared pleasures — gathering to listen to favourite announcers on the beeb, ferrying across the Mersey en masse to the lilt of “Dirty Old Town” —  shape the post-war Liverpool of Davies’ recall.  At the centre of the film, Peggy Lee sings "The Family that Lived on the Hill" to archival footage of housing projects under demolition.   This sequence was the catalyst for Davies to launch his meditative anti-travelogue.  

In revealing the shadows and light of his own private Liverpool, Davies returns to the strategy of his earliest narratives, Distant Voices/Still Lives and its follow-up The Long Day Closes.  Music propels Davies' storytelling, regardless of textual narrative.  Of Time and the City layers poetic text —his own and others’— to the score of largely period music that provides the narrative arc.  In features like The Neon Bible or The House of Mirth, his signature visual style — luminous, painterly colour, unhurried pacing — is allied to his selective sampling of popular song.  The catch is that Davies’ taste in music, as with most choices, follows a backward trajectory: to classics and period jazz, skipping past the vibrant immediacy of the Beatles and anyone after for the pop music of his parents' bygone era.  Here as elsewhere, Davies reveals himself as a filmmaker whose subject may appear musty — à la Proust — whose persona may be stubbornly unfashionable, whose audience may never grow past the boundaries of the sartorially challenged.  Yet whose command of time lost and found resonates long after even the most cursory viewing.

My Left Eye or Diving after devotion

January 22, 2010
Watching Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) situates the viewer in author/subject Jean-Dominque Bauby's often excruciating, ultimately exhilarating, present. Opening to the sights and sounds of a hospital room, Schnabel's camera immediately puts the viewer in Bauby's uncomfortable skin. His eye becomes the frame through which we view experience.  Initially confined to the terms of Bauby's condition of "locked-in syndrome" (an active mind within a paralyzed body), we see exactly and only as he does. His helpless immobility is graphically brought home in a scene reminiscent of Buñuel: Bauby's right eye is shown close-up as the camera's lens (his "eye") is gradually sewn shut causing the screen to go black.

The claustrophobia of Bauby's condition is relieved by the introduction of two therapists who prove crucial to his resurgence. Through the determination of Henriette, a speech therapist armed with a technique for isolating the most frequently used letters in French, Bauby learns he can communicate in the blink of an eye.  With painstaking effort and concentration, Bauby is able to prise open a window of his physical prison, eventually dictating the text that becomes the basis of his memoir.  In his confinement, Bauby suffers an acute loss of liberty and agency in his own life.  He is cared for and completely dependent on others.  In summoning his imagination and powers of recall, he accesses the freedom his temporal existence denies him.

Freedom from the body's restrictions and mortal functions has long been an abiding goal of religious faith, east and west.   Techniques for transcending ordinary physical responses to sensory stimuli — mostly associated with pain — have been practised and recorded by mystics of many faiths.  The attainment of trance-like, visionary states of consciousness — whereby the physical body is transcended and rendered almost immaterial — have also been well documented.  The urge to escape the confines of our physical selves — bound by limitations of time and space, to say nothing of race, culture, class, ability, and more — has held an enduring fascination.  It is a need all too familiar to policing authorities and social workers dealing with the trade and usage of narcotics worldwide.

The overwhelming urge fuelling this common drive to overcome corporeal restrictions is the experience of suffering and mortality.  Suffering and misery are the trope against which mysticism and hallucinogens arise.  Involuntary confinement — echoed in the title of Assigné au Residence, Jean-Jacques Beineix's record of the real Bauby in hospital — becomes Bauby's defining experience.   In his position of suspended animation, he is both sufferer and hero.  Like the fictional counterpart he aspired to revisit, the Count of Montecristo, enforced confinement prompts Bauby to examine his life  and outlook.  His refusal to succumb to despair — not however without recourse to moments of defeat and self-pity — appears to follow an established arc of incarceration or privation narratives: physical captivity or deprivation opening up soaring imaginative possibilities.

In many respects, Schnabel's film falls into and delivers a standard triumph-of-the-human-spirit storyline.  It fulfills the uplift promised by the genre's true-life origins. On second viewing, it also provides a surprising glimpse at devotion, secular-style.  Deprived of the capacity to sin,  Bauby exists in a quasi state of grace.  His bodily confinement and prominence in popular intellectual circles combine to transform him into something of a secular sacred object: a hero whose suffering becomes a focus of prayerful petition.  After initial resistance, Bauby acquiesces to the hospital's mission, cooperating with his devoted therapists and adapting to the institution's routines.  While his conscious self experiences the indignity of requiring help with basic bodily functions, his corporal body comes to be regarded as something of a living relic: a precious object through which petitioners are able to reach the remote spirit associated with it.  Bauby's interactions with his therapists partake of this spirit.  When Marie the physical therapist demonstrates actions with her tongue for him to practice in order to swallow, Bauby reacts with understandable erotic frustration. Marie's suggestive action is innocent sacrilege: at once urging animation of the spirit trapped within while simultaneously underlining its carnal denial.   Later, following up on the disclosure of her religious devotion, Marie takes Bauby to mass where the priest also treats him as something of a venerate presence.  Bauby's connection to relics is explicitly depicted in flashback: a weekend tryst with a mistress at the unlikely lovers destination of Lourdes.  To his suprise, Bauby's paramour insists her lover accompany her to visit the Madonna.  A highlight of their unlikely pilgrimage is Bauby's purchase of a Madonna figure, whose relentless, battery-powered radiance assists in the couple's dissolution.

For his part, Bauby responds to his celebrity freak status with equanimity, recounting the seemingly worldwide campaign of prayers on his behalf.  His mockery of the marginal role he occupies in the lives of colleagues and loved ones is in contrast to scenes with his children where his inner thoughts reveal remorse and helpless chagrin.  In one particularly devastating scene, he is "visited" by the single individual he has sought the most: his lover, Inès.  Not daring to appear in the flesh, she enters Bauby's hospital room by phone during a visit from Céline, his children's mother. The awkwardness of this unhappy triangle is complicated by Inès immediate insistence on privacy against the practical requirement for an interpreter.  The camera records Bauby's painful inertia as he listens to his lover confess her tearful grief.  Fed up being the unwilling go-between, Céline hangs up on Inès.  The lover's absence and her narcissism are contrasted against Céline's insistent presence.

None of this is in Bauby's memoir, at least not explicitly.  In a 2008 television interview with David Frost leading up to that year's Academy Awards, screenwriter Ronald Harwood describes how he went about adapting the book.  The breakthrough came with his decision to tell the story literally from Bauby's cramped perspective, forcing the camera to be its subject's eye.  Finding a structure for conveying both the harsh austerity of Bauby's condition and his butterfly mind seems to have given Schnabel license to also find visual equivalents for Bauby's roving inner eye.  It's no surprise —given Bauby's professional and personal history — that Harwood's screenplay celebrates women.  From the neglected Céline — anonymous in the memoir — to the tirelessly devoted Claude Mendibil, to the mistresses, therapists and colleagues, women appear as constants: unassuming angels, fugitive apparitions, fleeting partners in love, even the Blessed Virgin.  Unlike Bauby's sutured right eye, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly illuminates the feat of his wilfull assertion of intellect and imagination against paralysing inertia through gorgeous, often lyrical images that in turn speak eloquently of inadvertent devotion.
(See Luke Davies' Eyewitness account for another account and comparison.)

Oracles & Elegy

Winter-Spring, 2009
For my mother, it's fortune tellers; she consults them to have her hopes confirmed. For me, it's movies, literature, theatre.

Tonight I saw Elegy, with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley. I'd read about it in the New Yorker over the summer, and the reviewer had classed it within a minor genre of movies about academics, noting that usually the type is portrayed as genial, somewhat bumbling, generally harmless. He also noted that in recent years a different, less benign portrait had emerged — combative (The Squid & the Whale) or aging icon (Starting Out in the Evening).  Elegy falls into the latter category, with the added frisson of carnality.

An intellectual who's built his reputation on critiquing social mores, David Nekesh (Ben Kingsley) is a man who prizes freedom and independence above all. He arranges his life in order to be free of entanglements. Sex comes in the form of occasional encounters with an attractive former student (gamely played by Patricia Clarkson) close to his age, equally attached to detachment. Exercise is provided via regular games of squash with George O'Hearn (Dennis Hopper), prize-winning poet and fellow cynic who nevertheless remains married, serial infidelities notwithstanding.

Into Nekesh's sterile orbit strays Consuelo (Penelope Cruz), a young Cuban woman determined to achieve her parents' dream of academic success. David's credentials, his apparently boundless command of all things cultural and artistic ensnare Consuelo, who is not so much tabula rasa as  emotionally porous. She has the misfortune to fall in love with David, and to expect a response from him. When he inevitably fails her by standing her up at her graduation party, she is crushed and the affair from which David has long sought to extricate himself is over.  He consoles himself at her loss by accepting O'Hearn's invitation to introduce him at a high profile reading, only to have this emotional pillar pulled from under when O'Hearn collapses onstage. His friend's eventual degeneration and death leave David depleted, somewhat lost, but not so vulnerable as to unseat his carefully cultivated stance of detachment.

In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Consuelo contacts David shortly after O'Hearn's death. She wants to meet him in order to relate what cannot be said otherwise. After he agrees and she comes up to his apartment as of old, Consuelo reveals that she is sick with cancer, and that she has to have an operation that will remove her breasts. She challenges David who was smitten with her body to be as enthralled with her following surgery. She comes to him to be photographed; she wants him to picture her as she was, as she wants to be for him, perfect.

The scene is heartbreaking; earlier the poet insists that "beautiful women are invisible." David protests it's impossible, yet the poet persists: "we don't see the woman, we are blinded by her physical beauty." As Penelope Cruz stares unblinkingly at David, camera in hand, slowly and deliberately removing her clothes to reveal her beautiful breasts, she dares David to look at her and see her at last, all of her.

Later in the hospital after the operation, David listens to Consuelo regret how much of her life she feels she's wasted. He does not contradict her, but simply affirms his presence. It is the closest he comes to giving of and revealing himself. Despite the melodrama of Consuelo's reappearance and sickness-unto-death, Elegy is no latter day Love Story. Her death isn't the "point" of the story; it's the catalyst for David's long-delayed maturity. Yet the ending is inconclusive. We are back at the beach where David and Consuelo had gone earlier, where David had promised to take Consuelo, to reveal the great cities of Europe to her. Sensibly, perhaps knowingly, Consuelo demurs. This time the sky is overcast, and the lovers have their backs to us. Is this a flashback to earlier times, or a flash forward to a hoped for future?

Like The Savages earlier this year and Venus last year, Elegy looks at how we put off growing up/growing old by refusing to recognize our age. In Elegy, David's elixir is zipless fucks, the promise of eternal youth (or at least the staying of age) through a lifetime of arrested adolescence. The poet alludes to this when he challenges David to admit to their both engaging in endless immaturity. He also reveals, surprisingly, that he and his long-suffering wife have now, despite each other, discovered one other anew. For all David's vaunted need for unfettered experience and independence, this kind of intimacy eludes him. But not entirely. At the end in Consuelo's hospital room, David finally lets down his guard enough to let Consuelo in.

Diva at 50

Not quite frisson and yet...the realization that Alba would be middle-aged in 2007 gives me pause. No longer the jailbait siren on roller skates, muse to the reclusive eccentric Gorodish, possessed of an enviably nonchalant insouciance. Of course we are in a French movie; where else but in French films do heroines behave in ways unrecognizable to women who either don't happen to be French, or never get to be in French movies. Just what am I talking about? Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim. Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita. Charlotte Rampling in Swimming Pool (okay Charlotte Rampling isn't French, but she's lived in France so long she might as well be.) All these women — as much as little Alba — appear caught on screen, delivering actions that defy sense and logic, but somehow adhere to their characters' intrinsic sang froid and internal engine of mystery and allure.

And Alba is nothing if not alluring. When Jules (of course his name is Jules) first meets Alba, she is casually selecting music albums she has no intention of buying. Alba is no ordinary consumer, she is an accomplished thief. When the store clerk stops her and demands to go through the case in which she stashes the loot, she brazenly obliges with a portfolio of oversize nudie photographs of herself. Exiting the store, the camera follows Jules' gaze, fixating on a moving European monument in the form of Alba's mini-skirted derrière.

This moment, as much as the rest of the Jean-Jacques Beneix's film, feels excitingly modern. Insouciance in Asian form, Paris-style. For me, this was — is — the appeal of Diva, the 1981movie adapted from Delacorta's novel of the same name. Like everything else, Diva wears its drop-dead multiculturalism stylishly.

Diva toys with expectations, flirting with propriety. Of course there is the swooning love story of operatic proportions and postmodern irony. And the criminal element that speaks to the entire fallen demi-monde that everyone but the diva of the title herself inhabits. Between these worlds are Jules, the young chevalier on motorcycle, who transgresses the diva Cynthia Hawkins by capturing her voice on tape, yet somehow retains an air of innocence and adulation. On the other, there is Gorodish, the recluse who dreams of stopping a wave, who practices and espouses zen and the art of buttering bread, who contrives to thwart the machinations of the criminal elements that power the plot with a cool dispatch James Bond would kill for.

As a movie, it's easy to watch Diva for all its surface charms: the stylish saturated colours, the casual cynicism of the characters (hiding out from hit men, Jules takes refuge with a friend whose cat is called Ayatollah), the lyricism of the wordless scenes between Cynthia and Jules walking through Paris in the rain, scored to an insiduously melancholy scale reminiscent of Satie.

The romance at the heart of Diva — like Gorodish's slightly unsavory relationship with Alba — is tarnished, impure. Motivated by worship of the goddess he imagines Cynthia to be, Jules nevertheless violates his beloved in the most unforgivable way: he captures her voice, thereby commodifying what was once unique and ephemeral. Cynthia's gift as an artist — the intimacy she cultivates in her audience through the act of performance — is ravaged by Jules' recording, which changes the meaning of Cynthia's art, displacing her living presence with its artificial representation. The subplot involving a ring of African prostitutes replays the story in a minor key. The connection becomes explicit as Jules transforms a black prostitute into his adored "Queen of the Night" by making her wear Cynthia's stolen gown.

The despoilment of beauty — the imperfection of art — is also at the heart of the scene where Gorodish lures the corrupt police chief Saporta to his undoing. "Disorder," Gorodish intones, as he repeatedly attempts to unsettle his adversary. It's his apparent embrace of the chaotic and non-linear that is the source of Gorodish's charm, and the movie's appeal: seducing us like Alba, with its disarming layers of chic, irony, and action.

In its final scene, the diva and her devotee achieve a kind of reconciliation. No longer enmeshed by the twin evils of commercialism (incarnated by a shady Taiwanese duo) or corruption (the mismatched hitmen, the "Antillais" and bespoke "Priest"), Cynthia hears herself sing for the first time as Jules plays the offending recording. At this point, the seduction is complete. Cynthia does not reject her lover, demanding the destruction of what he has risked his life to preserve. Cynthia allows herself to be captured for the moment; she shares in Jules' selfish enjoyment of her.

Whether she herself enjoys the pleasure of her own captivity or fakes enjoyment only to please Jules is not known. The curtain in a sense comes down and the movie is over. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

Emily B's stitch 'n bitch

On a machine, a basement in Vancouver — a well oiled machine — the plain surface ahead; no shine, no nap, dull matte. Under scrutiny the flaws evident, unavoidable. A seam sewn how many times and here's the bitch of it. Every one inside out gone bad, gone wrong. She sucks back a cackle.

Pieces of cloth decorate the floor, post-modern hopscotch or trip hazard, take your pick. She has not picked up pen or paper of late and this awareness needles her. She does not own the machine that's replaced them. Her timing couldn't be worse: the offspring's dance recital might as well be yesterday. She examines the sewn pieces. All of them, one after another, relentlessly, flagrantly fucked. She's of a mind to find the neglected vacuum and suck up the evident failure. There, she would proclaim to the withering offspring — facing down the corps de ballet elders of identical gorgon glare — it's the void.  Not my fault if the great chasm opens up at last and claims, thank god, only the gaudy bits.

Oh, Mom, the offspring cuts in, nobody gets your jokes. They're ...
What? Obscure? Erudite?
Kind of lame, mom. Sorry, she adds, offhand shrug notwithstanding.

Where did she come from, this junior planetarian without a stitch of irony? And why does she not own the machine that's replaced pen and paper for every writer who writes not a stitch. There are those who sew and those who knit and those who cook and those who wander naked on the moors, blasted heath and weathered stone be damned.

Oh yes, but that was long ago and far away, another galaxy. She was younger then, she had sisters, a brother, an adoring father. They lived together before television, before computers, before machines that razzed and hummed and retorted. They told each other stories. They laughed, they sang, they played and studied interchangeably. They wandered out on the moors in long, ungainly clothes, hair unspeakably neat, nothing and everything indistinguishable from the blasted heath. She put up stories sprung from weather alone, hardwired by the elements. Her sisters shrank from her thunder. You have to write about people, they insisted, you can't just thrash around with bones and mud and gables and stones. So to spite them she did. Banshee-voiced and sinewy, she wrote of souls possessed of the desolate landscape of longing, of cliffs and quarries and lightning.

So goes the fiction. She's heard it all before, endless playlist if she's feeling especially masochistic. Sometimes a tap dance, sometimes a slouch. She sings one to the offspring, who if she bothers to listen between episodes of the Simpsons, complains the notes sound flat, the tune weird not catchy like Rihanna or Britney Spears.

The longer she stares, the more she drifts. It's no use, there's no fix, no salvage, no workaround, no miracle save. She must be rip roaring Jack today, the whole nine yards and more if she's unlucky, and she is.  Get back, she hums. Get back to where you once belonged. To where I was, when I was, what I was ... Can it be so hard to find the means, the technology, the mojo, the juice, the transport, the light saber to blast the goddamn stumbling block to kingdom come?

Hold onto the material.  Don't let slip. Still time. 

The moors...what a trip. The basement of a house she merely occupies, all warmth and comfort, no draughts, contagion, bloody coughs.  No goddamn sickness unto death.

Rip the fabric.  Still time.  Stitch by stitch.

October 1970

Turn on the TV and it snows.
In 1970 it is cold everywhere. I am a beetle in a short black plastic coat over bare legs; I shudder and freeze. I have no idea of winter, how cold it can be, how long it lasts. What snow tastes like.
On TV, the news is on. A man gets out of a car, he is someone important. Journalists surround him, question him about police and guns. He smiles; turn off the sound if you don't want unpleasantness.
In 1970 my mother falls through ice. Not thick ice, not through icy water crossing a lake. She falls on a road, on a small slick of mainstreet downtown.
We are only just arrived, and I am here in this country reluctantly. Just like the year before when we left Trinidad for Miami. In Trinidad, we move three times as far as I recall: from Woodbrook, to Cascade, to St. Anns. Before that, we call Guyana, formerly British Guiana, home. (They had met in Georgetown — my mother's hometown — after my father returned from England, where he'd spent the War and the Depression. He had come back, he would later explain, to bury his first wife—a picture bride of sorts — who developed cancer not long after the birth of their only child.)
They are nomads, my parents. They are driven by fear and mistrust and the promise of riches. The story is they are moving to make a better life for me and my sisters. They are business people; it is only prudent in the circumstances.
My parents are unmistakeably Chinese but neither of them speaks the language. The way they explain it, my father’s mother was too busy single-handedly raising a large family in the bush in British Guiana to have time for language lessons. My mother’s relations are more complicated; with them Chinese seems the least of the family mysteries.
Lacking the language, we are creole Chinese. "Pure" Chinese, yet since we don't belong to the Chinese Association, we are not Chinese enough. In Trinidad in the late sixties, our peculiarity — we are visibly not mixed or creole — is provocation enough. At least, according to my parents. We are used to taunts and jeers of “chinky, chinky, chinee.” What else is new? But to my family, worse is to come. Insults, threats, beatings, attacks and rapes; these are just around the corner. To not see the writing on the wall is to recklessly tempt fate, to invite disaster. Why stay where we can never really belong? America beckons from Florida. America where everyone is safe and free and fortunes can be spun overnight. In Miami we can escape obeah, backoos and all the rest of the Black Power baccanal.
But Miami has other ideas. Havanna is rising in America, Castro be damned. Black people, then as now, occupy the outskirts, white Americans and Cuban emigrés vie for main street. My parents set up shop in Liberty City in northwest Miami. They regularly receive clothes for cleaning from locals entrusting their better laundry to the strange new Orientals behind the counter.
My little sister and I go to Catholic schools. In Trinidad, public schools are Catholic or Protestant, but in Miami these schools are private and charge fees to attend. At my high school I am the freak with the lunches of dark yellow curry, and the accent begging for a bruising. I am also younger than the other girls — there are only girls — in my class (in my school) who are shaving their legs and preening for boys. I become a target of their softball practice, I stumble over the pledge of allegiance, I cannot be more awkwardly ungaingly unlikely to succeed if I try.
So I turn to the women’s movement. I read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. (Not in the original, in Newsweek.) I listen to Glen Campbell and Dionne Warwick. I read Emily Brontë and Dostoyevsky and Joseph Conrad. (Not the Coles notes.)
My mother never lets us forget we are worth only half, that it takes two TT dollars to make one Yankee greenback, that everything costs double. Race riots break out in Liberty City and a torch lands on the roof of their premises. They scraped and saved and sold everything for a dream of safety and prosperity gone crazy. On TV, Neil Armstrong walks and bounces on the moon’s powdery surface. We watch coverage of the Liberty City riots from a safe distance, in black and white. There is no mention of a Chinese-run business being attacked. Already superstitious, my mother needs no additional signs to read her future.
That summer we arrive in Canada to a heatwave. Being north of the United States, we assume the whole country is cooler year round. Perhaps we are in shock. We left Trinidad to avoid violence, for “a better life,” and in Miami somehow ran right toward it. But Canada is different, it has to be, it’s a different country. If Miami was a mistake, Canada — Toronto in particular — is known for calm. There are people we know who moved from the West Indies to Canada first; my mother has relatives in Scarborough. If they were brave enough to face the cold and snow before us, then so can we.
We go to the Canadian National Exhibition and my sister and I ride the Wildmouse, the compact roller coaster that scared and thrilled us only three years earlier at Expo in Montréal. Then we were tourists like the rest of the world seeing the Fair. We hardly dreamed of leaving Trinidad and moving to Canada. Yet here we are now settling into a different city in Canada where everyone speaks English like us, where there are real seasons, not just hot and cold or wet and dry.
Who said anything about separatists?
French. Québec. FLQ. It is all new to me. I am a foreigner twice removed, living in a Dostoyevsky novel. My world is all pimples and small breasts and boys fawning over my perfect blonde classmate in her perfect angora sweater pirouetting perfectly on ice.
The first time I see Les Ordres is at least four years later. I am at university, one of the Curtis lecture halls at York U. is screening a new movie, a new kind of documentary. My-friend-the-separatist is having a screening of his short film, and he has heard a lot about the director of Les Ordres. He makes us all go. Or else we will miss not just this movie, this history too.
Crossing Bloor Street in sandals, heels and straps in December, my mother does not see the shiny slick of ice underfoot. She is busy looking ahead, trying to make out how to get by in this cold country. She is bracing herself for what’s coming at her, day in day out. She is not looking down. So when her knee gives out, she lands hard, bawling like an infant its head suddenly tender. Has she taken Bloor for Frederick Street, Toronto in winter for Trinidad in the dry season, ice for banana peel?
Front. I still don’t understand how it happened, how Canada almost went to war with itself, how my mother fell exactly. I wasn’t born here, I remind myself. This isn’t my grudge, my country, my burden to solve. And yet ... My-friend-the-separatist likes to put me on the spot. Why not? To him I am just another anglophone, no one special. He is the one with the accented English, not me. My accent is long gone. Why do I feel so deferential around him? Does he know more than me about his own history? Is he right to be angry about it? I want to shrug like the rockstar politician with the sideburns I remember seeing on TV; forget landed immigrant, I’m an alien, they're more honest in the States.
My friend enjoys my discomfort. He says I am too self-conscious. When he grows up he’s going to have lots of kids and make lots of movies. With him there is no fear of the culture shrivelling into nothingness; it will multiply and thrive in its own, his own image.
Liberation. I picture my mother in a dark, wood-panelled room in a floral nightie against white hospital sheets. Outside the window, white flurries fall and pile up on still more white: dirty beige, soft gray, white white. So many colours of white here in Canada. I learn what my mother never does, to cover my legs in trousers like a man, to protect myself, even in the heat, even back in Trinidad. My mother cannot. She can never violate the law her Popo laid down forbidding pants on girls and women, no exceptions, no excuses, no shifting ground; here be terra firma in perpetuity.
I hardly know my mother without pain; it is the one constant in our lives growing up, even now. Whatever upheaval, whatever vicissitudes, there is always my mother’s pain to rely on. Like an old boyfriend, my mother’s pain refuses to go, against her most strenuous efforts, treatment after endless treatment. As a teenager, I know better than the adults around me. I know my parents have made a horrible mistake dragging the family up to the tundra where the first thing my mother does is land in hospital. What have they done but increase the pain?
I like to think it is events in Québec, the FLQ crisis of the time, that chases my family out of Canada. There we are: refugees of our own making, fleeing crisis upon crisis; in transit, victims of circumstance, of our own design, invisible all the same.
When I watch Brault’s film— then as now —I read the subtitles. In French I pick out individual words, on rare occasions whole phrases without the mediation of translation. Those instances occur less and less. The extent of my second language acquisition remains arrested at about grade 2. While she lives in Montréal and I in Toronto, I visit my sister regularly by train. After years of dedicated study, and living in a bilingual city, my sister is fluent in french. Determined to master the language, she does: writing and defending her masters thesis in french. Where I shadow the culture through food and films, my sister takes on philosophers like Blaise Pascal. I learn to cook the french way, from Julia Child and Time-Life’s provincial and classic french cookbooks. She goes to the Sorbonne, picks up a third language, ancient greek, along the way. At university, Jean Genet glowers disdainfully from an oversize black and white poster on my residence wall, daring visitors to identify him as a writer of anything less than criminal proportions. Provocation, intellect, chic. All these are french to me. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless, what else could they be but French? I have yet to encounter Michel Tremblay, to grasp that french in this country is french-Canadian, that patois here is joual, that poutine rules over paté, that stop signs say arrêt, that people swear on the catholic church.
I wonder if I’ll ever bump into my old friend-the-separatist, in his old uniform: black t-shirt, beard, red lumberjack shirt. Will we recognize each other, what language will we speak — our own or each other’s? Do I feel compelled to talk about language, about Québec, about what I know now, how ignorant I was then, am still. Or do we chat about our children, spouses, work, the weather, old student days, the chances of running into each other by chance? Do we laugh, share a meal together, shuffle uncomfortably, have to go someplace else, shake hands, embrace, return each other’s glance, connect at all? Or pass each other by unobserved, spared by complicit anonymity?
It is May before my mother emerges from the Lockwood Clinic. She has spent all winter — four months — confined in a small tudor-style building of dark wood near the intersection of Bloor and Sherbourne. We visit her regularly, but scarcely, not enough. While she is gone, we gain gloves and scarves, sweaters, tights, ice skates and the knowledge of how to use them. We grow, if not to like winter, at least to live with it.
Mon pays, ce n’est pas mon pays, c’est l’hiver ...
Like my family, I am a nomad. I continue our habit of settling elsewhere, many times over. Unlike my mother, I scratch and dig for the place called home. Unlike her, I live in post-colonial intrasigence, in that treacherous whorl of displaced identities and hybridized reality, where rootlessness is, if not embraced, at least named.
Just watch me, he said.
I change channels.